Randy Kraft’s Triple Life Baffles Old-Time Friends

They were such close pals at Westminster High School that classmates good-naturedly called them the Three Musketeers.

One moved to Canada during the Vietnam War. One became a research chemist in Florida. One stayed in Southern California and became a serial killer.

Randy Steven Kraft’s arrest 6 years ago stunned his friends and co-workers. His conviction Friday in Orange County for 16 murders saddened Paul E. Whitson.

Whitson, second in the class of ’63 at Westminster High, is the research chemist. Whitson, Kraft and the third student who later went to Canada were always together. They were among the brightest students; their interest in learning was their most common bond.

Whitson remembers Kraft as “a normal kid, just like everybody else.” Twenty years later, Kraft would lead what law enforcement officials describe as secret, multiple lives--as a devoted family member, skilled computer programmer and mass murderer.

“People do change. But it is incongruous that the Randy Kraft I knew could ever commit such crimes,” Whitson said. “Time and distance ended my friendship with Randy long ago. But there is a sadness, a remembrance of times past.”

Were there signs, Whitson has wondered, of the dark streak in Kraft’s personality, of whatever made him capable of disabling young men with drugs or alcohol, sexually mutilating them and dumping their bodies along freeways?

The signs didn’t exist, Whitson decided.

Many from Kraft’s class recall his arrest on May 14, 1983. News spread quickly that he might be responsible for dozens of murders.

Cheryl and Clarence E. Haynes discussed how incredulous it all seemed. The couple had been Kraft’s classmates.

“We agreed that if we had to pick five people in our class who would never, ever be accused as some type of mass murderer, Randy would be one of the five,” said Clarence Haynes, a Santa Ana lawyer who had been student body president.

Kraft, now 44, was a former Student for Nixon, Boy Scout and member of his high school debate team. He was known as quiet but friendly. He played in the band for 1 year and was on the school’s tennis team for 2 years.

“Everybody liked Randy,” said Kay Frazell, a former classmate who said she once had a crush on him.

The Musketeers were typical kids, Whitson said. “The things we liked to do were very normal kinds of things: go to the beach, grab a hamburger.”

Kraft, an honors student, and another Musketeer shared a keen interest in politics. Whitson and Kraft shared an interest in technical subjects at school. They enjoyed solving problems. Discussing their classes was a favorite pastime.

After high school, Kraft attended prestigious Claremont Men’s College, graduating in 1967 with an economics degree. He entered the U.S. Air Force on June 14, 1968. But 13 months later, the Air Force gave him a general discharge after he admitted to military officials that he was gay, according to several sources.

Whitson, now living in Clearwater, Fla., remembers returning to Southern California with his wife a year or so after that and going out for drinks with Kraft.

Kraft took them to the Buoys Shed in Sunset Beach, where he worked part time as a bartender. Whitson recalls that it took him a few moments to realize it was a gay bar.

“Randy told me, for the first time, that he was gay, and said in effect that this was his new life style,” Whitson said.

Whitson said it surprised him. Kraft had given no hint in high school that he was gay. Whitson was certain this revelation would not affect their friendship. But time and distance did.

The Buoys Shed, which no longer exists, was near the Stables, another gay bar also gone. Law enforcement officials say Kraft was a regular at both places. A bartender at the Stables, 30-year-old Wayne Joseph Dukette, was found dead at the bottom of a ravine next to Ortega Highway on Oct. 5, 1971. Although Dukette was not listed in the charges filed against Kraft, prosecutors claim he was Kraft’s first victim.

Kraft went on to work in a series of jobs that appeared to be below both his intelligence and his education. He had an entry-level job at the Arrowhead Water Co. after his days as a bartender, and his work file there showed he tested at an IQ level of 129. He also served a brief stint as a teacher’s aide in the Long Beach Unified School District.

In 1974, Kraft became a dispatcher for the Aztec Aircraft Co. in Long Beach. He was working there when Long Beach police questioned him about the 1975 death of Keith Daven Crotwell, 19. It was the only time, until his arrest 8 years later, that he ever came close to being arrested for the murders he was convicted of Friday.

Also while at Aztec, Kraft took courses at Cal State Long Beach, working toward teaching credentials. But he never pursued a teaching career. Instead, he began to take training in computers.

He worked primarily at J. El Products in Gardena, with a stint at Pacific Computer Systems in Long Beach in 1977. Kraft was a free-lance consultant until he joined Lear Siegler Inc., based in Santa Monica, in 1980. When the economy slowed, he was one of many white-collar workers laid off by the company in early 1983.

After Lear Siegler, Kraft was inundated with offers for free-lance computer work, according to Kraft’s former roommate, Jeff Selig. Work records produced in court showed he often worked two jobs at once.

It was during these computer years, law enforcement officials say, that Kraft essentially led three different lives.

By day, he was the busy executive, working out computer plans for companies.

Donald Sheahan, a swim wear distributor who hired Kraft to set up a computer program for his company in Torrance, said Kraft was such a good worker he gave him the keys to the place and let him work his own hours late at night.

“I had total trust in him,” Sheahan said.

Kraft would spend evenings with his roommate Selig, a candy maker, either at quiet dinners at the Long Beach house they bought together or at their favorite gay bars.

Danny Saavedra, manager at the Ripple’s gay bar on Ocean Boulevard in Long Beach, remembers them well.

“They would sit quietly at a table with friends or go upstairs and dance,” Saavedra said. “But their favorite bar was the Silver Fox, at 4th and Redondo” in Long Beach.

Kraft usually entered his secret life on weekends. With his roommate often working or away, Kraft would spend the nights roaming Southern California freeways, always gravitating to Orange County, where he was raised. It was on these excursions, prosecutors say, that Kraft picked up hitchhikers, drugged them, killed them and then mutilated their bodies.

“Kraft had an incredible ability to keep these three lives totally separate,” said one law enforcement official who has spent much of the past 6 years on the Kraft case.

If the theory is true, Kraft also had an amazing ability to slip from one life style to the next. The weekend when Geoffrey Alan Nelson and Rodger James DeVaul Jr. were murdered is an eerie example.

Kraft was playing bridge with gay friends in Huntington Beach on the Friday night that Nelson and DeVaul were last seen in 1983. Prosecutors say Kraft picked them up, perhaps hitchhiking, after the party ended, killed them, emasculated Nelson and sodomized DeVaul, and dumped their bodies 40 miles apart. He returned home to Long Beach, cleaned up and arrived in time for work at St. Ives Laboratories on the Palos Verdes Peninsula at 9 a.m. Saturday.

Later that day, he spent time on the telephone with his niece, Mindi Lane. They made plans to pick up the cake for Kraft’s father’s 75th birthday the next day.

Sunday morning, cake in hand, they joined the family gathered at a sister’s home. While the Krafts celebrated, law enforcement officials at Angeles National Forest north of Claremont were hauling the newly discovered body of Rodger DeVaul up a steep cliff where he had been dumped.

At the party, Kraft’s sister, Marlene Kay Plunkett, asked him if he would mind speaking to her class of students about the computer business. He said he would love to.

During his trial, Plunkett smiled at her brother as she described to the jury what an excellent presentation he gave and how inspired her students were.

Three months later, Kraft’s mysterious obsession with roaming the freeways again came at a time when everything else about his life appeared normal.

Evidence at his trial showed that on May 13, a Friday, he set up computer programs at two places, one in Downey and the other on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. When he arrived home in Long Beach, workers were busy installing an outdoor hot tub with a wood patio deck around it.

In the kitchen, Selig and a co-worker were preparing for that weekend’s chocolate convention at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Kraft helped them box the chocolate candy they were taking.

Shortly before dark, Selig and his friend left. So did the hot tub workers. Kraft was left alone. He was arrested a few hours later, 30 miles south of Long Beach.

Two California Highway Patrol officers had stopped him on Interstate 5, northbound in Mission Viejo, for erratic driving. A Marine, 25-year-old Terry Lee Gambrel from the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, was found dead in the front seat of Kraft’s car. He had been drugged and strangled, and his wrists were tied with a shoelace.

Investigators were shocked to find numerous color photographs of other known victims, most appearing either dead or unconscious, in lewd poses, under the floor mat on the driver’s side.

The sensational news about Kraft’s arrest sent his family into hiding from news reporters.

“It has been devastating for them,” said Kraft attorney C. Thomas McDonald. “But they love Randy, and they have been very devoted to him since his arrest.”

Since then, Kraft and Selig have sold their house. Selig became involved in a different relationship. While many wondered if he would testify at the trial, he was not called by either side.

Other friends did testify and appeared to support their old colleague. But Paul Whitson wonders.

“I believe we have a just system,” he said. “If Randy was found guilty, perhaps he really did kill these people.”

Even if he could see his old friend now, Whitson said, “I suppose I would probably have to spend a lot of time thinking whether I really would want to see him.”